Yeah - as in : that was not a poorly intonated "bum" note - I chose to play it a 'twelth' tone flat!! 
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Double Bass truly odd time sigs
- Thread starter velvetkevorkian
- Start date
There's a magazine for improv? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of improv?
I knew you meant it as a joke, and it's cool, but actually I like improv and harmolodics. At least they have history behind them based on real musical concepts.
I knew you meant it as a joke, and it's cool, but actually I like improv and harmolodics. At least they have history behind them based on real musical concepts.
JimmyM said:
I know I shouldn't rise to this, and this will be my last post on this topic, but surely you're not trying to say that contemporary classical composition doesn't have a history behind it and real musical concepts?
ever heard of schoenberg? ever heard of the history of classical music from baroque onwards?
oliebrice said:
Yes - but Schonberg never wrote a 12th note - and as I was saying in the middle of the 20th Century, people like Stockhausen were developing new methods of notation, which is obviously the way to go if you are unhappy with the contstraints of the existing system - to go back to it and complain, seems both a retrograde step and lazy!!
Here's a short article from Classical Source which may explain the controversy here :
"The name of Brian Ferneyhough, who in the 1970s was Englands most prominent export to the heartland of modernist Europe and in the eighties consolidated a reputation as spiritual leader of the new complexity, seems even today to be a byword for all that is best and worst about hard-line musical modernism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the year after his sixtieth birthday, Ferneyhough must be the most senior British composer of international standing still to be dismissed outright or not taken seriously by a sizeable proportion of the contemporary-music establishment at home. At the same time, he continues to be feted both in America where he has held a series of prestigious teaching appointments and in continental Europe, where he is a regular guest lecturer at festivals and summer schools."
"The name of Brian Ferneyhough, who in the 1970s was Englands most prominent export to the heartland of modernist Europe and in the eighties consolidated a reputation as spiritual leader of the new complexity, seems even today to be a byword for all that is best and worst about hard-line musical modernism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the year after his sixtieth birthday, Ferneyhough must be the most senior British composer of international standing still to be dismissed outright or not taken seriously by a sizeable proportion of the contemporary-music establishment at home. At the same time, he continues to be feted both in America where he has held a series of prestigious teaching appointments and in continental Europe, where he is a regular guest lecturer at festivals and summer schools."
A review of a London concert in 2004 :
"Brian Ferneyhough, the epitome of a 'complexity' composer, was shunned for many years by the UK establishment, and had to make his highly significant career abroad. This was underlined by his absence from a day celebrating his achievements, one of the highest profile events accorded to Ferneyhough in his own country. Underlining this situation was his absence from South Bank; instead we saw on screen parts of an interview in Paris.
Ferneyhough's filmed introductions to his Incipits & Tableaux were impenetrable, as too the seven Charles Bernstein poems for the composer's Seven Tableaux, set for speaker (Roderick Williams) with the London Sinfonietta, even though the texts were provided for study. "
"Brian Ferneyhough, the epitome of a 'complexity' composer, was shunned for many years by the UK establishment, and had to make his highly significant career abroad. This was underlined by his absence from a day celebrating his achievements, one of the highest profile events accorded to Ferneyhough in his own country. Underlining this situation was his absence from South Bank; instead we saw on screen parts of an interview in Paris.
Ferneyhough's filmed introductions to his Incipits & Tableaux were impenetrable, as too the seven Charles Bernstein poems for the composer's Seven Tableaux, set for speaker (Roderick Williams) with the London Sinfonietta, even though the texts were provided for study. "
No, I've lived in a big cave in the middle of a mountain in Wyoming for the last 40 years.oliebrice said:
Come on, dude...that's the oldest trick in the book. Of course contemporary classical music has a history behind it. Even though the vast majority of it blows, there is a history behind it. There's no history behind writing 3/10 time signatures. What the hell is a 10th note? How do you write it? What differentiates it from an 8th or 16th note? It's total BS with no practical usage except in the delusions of the composer. So don't even try to compare it to the history of classical music, because I've been playing music a long time and I've never seen a piece where someone has attempted to write a 10th note, a 12th note, or a whatever note that isn't a square of 2 until now.
You know, on another somewhat related subject, I don't think it's a coincidence that in movies and TV, when looking for composers to compose symphonic pieces (which is probably the last bastion of the classical composer that wants to make money and not teach), the three biggest composers are ex-rock musicians, because they're probably the only three who write music that sounds good and doesn't try to be all atonal and pretentious. Nobody asks Ferneyhough to write soundtracks. And in case you're wondering, those three are Randy Newman, Danny Elfman from Oingo Boingo, and Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo.
is that stockhausen? i can't quite make out the sig at the bottom. looks very seasonal though... and not a 12th note in sight...
I haven't taken the time to read all the posts, but in my band with have songs that are in 3/6, 7/10, 13/7 etc...
Think of it like this:
Say you have a bar with two quarter notes and then eigth note quintuplets. Something like this -
0=quarter note
;=an eight note quintuplet
0 0 ;;;;;
This is a really simple bar in a way, as it adds up to 4/4. The last two beats do have an odd feel because of the quintuplets, nevertheless this bar is still human.
Now, say you have this:
0 0 ;;;;
One quintuplet eight note has been eliminated. Some people would be fooled into thinking that this is in 3/4 time, but that is incorrect. The eight note quintuplets still have the value of an eight note quintuplet even though if they are not in a complete group of 5. Thus, you apply some math to get a time sig. I don't remember what the outcome of this one was, it was something like 3/6.
It is not strange at all to encounter these things.
From Wikipedia:
Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 - August 10, 1997) was an American composer who took Mexican citizenship in 1955. He is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano, using it as a sort of mechanical music sequencer. He lived most of his life in complete obscurity, not becoming widely known until the 1980s. Today, he is remembered as one of the most original and unusual composers of the 20th century.
Many of these later pieces (which on the whole he called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution. While most such canons, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1, Nancarrow's canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio e to pi, while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.
As you can see, music is mathematics in a lot of ways. You can a time signature that is 23.56/17.178 . Of course, that would be impossible to play by a human, but people who are into electronic music and programming have come up with crazy stuff like this.
Think of it like this:
Say you have a bar with two quarter notes and then eigth note quintuplets. Something like this -
0=quarter note
;=an eight note quintuplet
0 0 ;;;;;
This is a really simple bar in a way, as it adds up to 4/4. The last two beats do have an odd feel because of the quintuplets, nevertheless this bar is still human.
Now, say you have this:
0 0 ;;;;
One quintuplet eight note has been eliminated. Some people would be fooled into thinking that this is in 3/4 time, but that is incorrect. The eight note quintuplets still have the value of an eight note quintuplet even though if they are not in a complete group of 5. Thus, you apply some math to get a time sig. I don't remember what the outcome of this one was, it was something like 3/6.
It is not strange at all to encounter these things.
From Wikipedia:
Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 - August 10, 1997) was an American composer who took Mexican citizenship in 1955. He is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano, using it as a sort of mechanical music sequencer. He lived most of his life in complete obscurity, not becoming widely known until the 1980s. Today, he is remembered as one of the most original and unusual composers of the 20th century.
Many of these later pieces (which on the whole he called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution. While most such canons, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1, Nancarrow's canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio e to pi, while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.
As you can see, music is mathematics in a lot of ways. You can a time signature that is 23.56/17.178 . Of course, that would be impossible to play by a human, but people who are into electronic music and programming have come up with crazy stuff like this.
BassUndertow said:
Well, this is bound to be good.
BassUndertow said:
You think you do, but you don't...unless you've discovered some way to write a 6th, 7th, or 10th note on a staff.
BassUndertow said:
Okay, I thought of it like that. Not that it was easy.
An eighth note quintuplet minus one eighth note ain't a quintuplet anymore. A quintuplet is five even notes over the space where four would normally fit rhythmically. Dropping an eighth note...just makes it four eighth notes. The only way to retain the quintuplet feel would be to tie the last two eighth notes together, or the first two, or any adjacent two. But that wouldn't at all change your original 4/4 measure.
BassUndertow said:
Sigh...where do these guys come up with this stuff?
You NEVER apply math to get a time signature. It's beats per measure and per-beat subdivision. Treating it as some kind of fraction or ratio just because it can be made to resemble one is absolutely, and downright embarrassingly, incorrect.
BassUndertow said:
The ratio of one tempo to another has NOTHING to do with meter. Meter expresses beats per measure and subdivision representing one beat
BassUndertow said:
No you can't. I mean, you can write it on a staff if you want, but it doesn't mean anything.
BassUndertow said:
Mind-jarringly experimental music exists, true. But misunderstanding how it works doesn't allow somebody to just start spouting out any wrong idea as gospel. That ought to apply to this Ferneyhough dude as well, who also seems to have mistaken meter markings for fractions and ratios, but sadly, he seems to have figured out that sesquipedalian pedantry can both energize true believers and scare off fainthearted skeptics.
Folks, meters and time signatures do one thing and do it well. Artistic tweaking of rhythm and tempo are terrific--I'm all for that. But trying to use meter and time signatures to accomplish them is wrongheaded. Your painting may be amazingly innovative, to proffer an analogy, but how you held your brush has nothing to do with the painting itself. Wacko meters and such are nothing more than performance art, or maybe some kind of meta-music: they may make you think about the process of composition itself...but ultimately, there are so many beats in a measure, and if you want to write it down you're going to have to use some kind of note--one of the ones we know, or one you made up and can describe to the rest of the world.
BassUnder**** said:
On purpose? I knew a singer who used to do that once: We'd be playing a tune in 4/4, and she'd manage to lose at least one beat every four bars. At first we thought she had bad time, or was drunk, or both. But after a couple of tunes, we realized that it was an intentional polysuperimposition, set to some quasi vocalistic genomal predispostion toward forward motion, as it were. But if you do the math, you'd see that she would be displacing time at regular subtractitive intervals, and that if you added it up, it came out to exactly 8 beats per chorus.
I'm sure that she was paying subconscious homage to Ives, but we ended up calling it "Time Fusion", because "subconscious homage to Ives" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, what?
Short version: the band just ended up skipping the last turnaround, and everybody was happy.
Wow. That process sounds really....memorable.
Clearly, one should speak for one's self in these matters.
As a human, this is all I need to know.
Jeff Michael Vincent said:
And indeed, it did not disappoint.
JEFF BRIDGES said:
Actually, I think I know how they do it: in 13/7, the "7" is really just an eigth note...they just call it a seventh note. When you do it like this, it's easy to write. Tricky theorists!
GORDON CAINE said:
No kidding. I couldn't even think of it like that at all.
HOAGY said:
See above.
I WANT TO RIDE MY... said:
I heard some of them follow cows with a bag, but that's just a rumor at this point.
ELF LIBEL said:
But hey - it sure beats practicing.
GEORGE said:
Holy cow Jeff and Chris - this is the funniest thing i've seen for a while on TB - lol? - I almost wet myself. Perhps we could invent a new set if intials on the lines of RTFM like RATFP (read all the 'fine' posts)?
john turner
You don't want to do that. Trust me.
jazzbassnerd said:
notation exists purely to express the music in a manner that can be readily understood. changing notation conventions to appear clever works counter to this goal. the point is to find the -easiest- method to convey the intentions of the composer. 4 notes of equal duration can -always- be described, in any situation, in a more understandable and intuitive manner than 4/12.
"how else do you define the value of eighth note triplets?" as eighth note triplets perhaps? anyone with any modicum of understanding is going to immediately recognize what is intended when they see notation for eighth note triplets. when someone sees 4/12 they are not going to understand at all.
